Thanks to a group of researchers using artificial intelligence, a group of ancient texts burned by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD were deciphered.
The nearly 2,000-year-old texts became unreadable after being charred in a villa in Herculaneum, a Roman town near Pompeii.
The texts, believed to be owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, were carbonized by the heat of the pyroclastic debris.
These ancient documents remained undiscovered for centuries until an Italian peasant discovered the villa in the mid-18th century.
Many of the scrolls were very elaborate but were destroyed due to early attempts to unfold them. They were found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. There are still hundreds left unopened and unreadable.
Last year, Dr. Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky led a team that used high-resolution CT scans to unfold text, which was a breakthrough. Still, the black carbon ink on the manuscripts made them unrecognizable from the papyrus.
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In partnership with tech investors, Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering a $1 million grand prize to a team capable of recovering 4 segments of 140 characters from the Herculaneum scroll.
Berlin-based PhD student Youssef Nader, SpaceX intern and student Luke Farritor, and Swiss robotics student Julian Schillinger have built an AI model that uses pattern recognition to decipher letters.
Their efforts have decoded about 5% of the first volume. These passages, believed to have been written by the philosopher Philosopher Philode, discuss the concept of happiness – considered the highest good in Epicurean philosophy.
The author writes:"Just like in the case of food, we don't immediately believe that what is scarce is definitely more pleasant than what is abundant. "He raises the question of whether it would be easier for us to do this without something abundant.
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